Happy new year, Futurismic readers! Here’s your first dose of free fiction for 2008:

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A big lump-lot at ManyBooks.net:

• “As Long As You Wish” by John O’Keefe
• “We Didn’t Do Anything Wrong, Hardly” by Roger Kuykendall
• “Make Mine Homogenized” by Rick Raphael
• “Pushbutton War” by Joseph P. Martino
• “The Ambulance Made Two Trips” by Murray Leinster
• “The Aliens” by Murray Leinster
• “The Sky Trap” by Frank Belknap Long
• “Disturbing Sun” by Robert Shirley Richardson (aka Philip Latham)
• “The Guardians” by Irving Cox
• “Egocentric Orbit” by John Cory
• “Dead Giveaway” , “Despoilers of the Golden Empire“, “Damned If You Don’t” and “The Measure of a Man” by Randall Garrett

[Just to reiterate the point, the above list (and indeed some of the below) would be impossible for us to compile on a weekly basis if not for cribbing vigorously from the hard-grafting folk at SF Signal, who have our deepest gratitude.]

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Via Nick Mamatas:

Happy New Year, and check out the latest from Clarkesworld Magazine!

“Debris Ensuing From A Supervortex” by Brian Ames.

And our feature article: Countdown to Singularity: A Conversation with Vernor Vinge by Shaun Farrell.

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Chris Roberson delivers Friday freebies yet again: “The Sky is Large and the Earth is Small“.

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Charles Sheehan-Miles wrote in to let us know that he has released the entirety of his alternate-near-future novel, Republic, free in all formats under a Creative Commons license.

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S.L. Viehl is using Scribd to host all her free-to-read fiction.

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Elizabeth Bear has posted of her short story “Tideline” (from the March 2007 Asimov’s) at her website.

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Podcast fiction! Audible offers “Could Be Worse” by James Patrick Kelly.

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It’s a bit thin on the ground for Friday Flash Fictioneers again, but there’s always a few of us defying such niceties as seasonal laziness … 😉

Neil Beynon delivers one of my favourites from his offerings so far: “The Edge Of The World“.

And in another one of those synchronous happenstances that seem to crop up so often in the world of FFF, both Gareth L Powell and I have stories involving salvaging, though in very different settings.

So take a visit to Gareth’s “Crash Site“, and then consider popping over to my blog and getting “Tagged“.

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And finally, a simultaneously funny and educational non-fiction bonus: The Annals of Improbable Research (also known as AIR) is the publication from the people who brought us the IgNobel Prizes, and it’s now available for free in lo-rez downloadable formats as well as old-school dead-tree media.

If you like genuine science and a good hard laugh, there’s no place you’ll ever find the two more closely meshed – consider that my personal recommendation! 🙂

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That’s your lot for this week, folks. Don’t forget to let us know if you see or hear of any free fiction you think we should be telling people about. Adios!